"The Mortal Immortal" by Mary Shelley (1833)

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) made her and her monster immortal. My guess is that for every person who has read it, a million have heard of Frankenstein.  I probably should have read it long ago and I think I now will do so soon.

I recently was given a review copy of a forthcoming collection of short stories.  I was very pleased to find Mary Shelley's story "The Mortal Immortal" was included.  (You can easily find it online.)

"The Mortal Immortal" is very much a standard gothic story with a sinister alchemist, mysterious potions, preoccupied with death. Narrated by a man we meet while he is young and in love with a girl who has been a family friend for years.  Her parents recently died and she is now the ward of a rich haughty old woman who does not see him as good marriage material.  

The man goes to work for an alchemist, one seeking to discover a potion that will secure immortality. The man, after some tribulations, marries the young woman, both are twenty.  The man takes a potion from the alchemist, he does not know if it will make him immortal but he is well over three hundred as he tells the story of his marriage, his wife long dead.   His wife ages normally but in forty years people take him for her grandson as he still looks twenty.  The most interesting aspect of the story was the story of how the marriage was impacted by the disparity in their rate of aging and how the man tried to hide his condition. 

I am glad I satisfied my curiosity about this story.  It was written to entertain and it does.

Mel u

"The Returning Wave" by Boleslaw Prus (1880, translated by Else Benecke)

Lately I have been getting into literature of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire countries and Yiddish literature.  I have felt a need to expand into Eastern Europe.  I looked for some reading ideas on the webpage of The New York Review of Books, always a good source.  One writer that caught my eye, I admit I had not previously heard of him, was Boleslaw Prus, from Poland.  I bit of Google searching soon exposed once again the depths of my ignorance when I discovered he is considered Poland's  greatest realistic writer.  He was very influenced by Mark Twain and Charles Dickens as well as the French leviathans Balzac, Hugo, Flaubert, and Zola.   He wrote in addition to several novels a number of short stories.  

I prefer when possible to post on works others can easily read for free if they like so I was glad to find a near novella length work by Prus in a collection of Polish short stories on Manybooks.  "The Returning Wave" centers on three men, a factory owner and a cleric, in a small town in Poland who have been friends for decades. The third principal character is the playboy son of the factory owner.  As the years went by the factory owner got richer and richer.  He would always say once he got just a little more money he would sell the factory and enjoy life. A widower, all ever did was work and worry over his son.  He wanted his  son to enjoy life so he over indulged him and heard from him only when he needed money.  One day the son shows up after a long hiatus to his father's great joy.  He learns the boy has huge gambling debts.  He pays them and to make up for it he lowers the pay of the factory workers, makes them work longer, and drives himself harder.  Of course the son promises reform and goes to work as assistant factory manager.  Soon the workers figure out he is why they have lost pay and he actually ferments discontent among the workers.  To make it worst the son tries  to seduce the virginal daughter of the cleric.  The owner begins to drive the workers harder and harder and speculated in cotton.

"The Returning Wave" does a wonderful job of bringing the factory owner, easily a character that could have been created by Balzac, and his plans to enjoy life soon to an excellent realization.   We learn a lot about factory life.  Some of the long term workers just silently accept any abuse and others make us sense a great underlying social upheaval might be coming.  The ending of the story is really powerful and very shocking, in no way did I see it coming.  

There are a few more Prus stories online and I hope to read them and some of his novels.

You can download the story HERE

Winston's Dad, a blog focusing on quality literature in translation, which I have been following for a long time, is conducting an event devoted to Eastern European Literature this month.  This post is my initial participation in the event.  If you are at all interested in this rich reading life area, I suggest you look at the event page and participate if you can.

Eastern European Literature Month on Winston's Dad

From the webpage of the New York Review of Books.

Bolesław Pru

Bolesław Prus (1847–1912) was born Aleksander Głowacki in the provincial town of Hrubieszów, Poland. His mother died in 1850; his father, an estate steward of noble birth (the author’s pen name is a reference to the family’s origin near the Prussian border), died six years later, leaving him in the care of relatives in Puławy and Lublin. In 1862, he moved to Kielce with his older brother Leon, a Polish patriot. The next year, the teenaged Aleksander joined in the January 1863 uprising against Russian rule. Wounded in battle, he was imprisoned in Lublin Castle, but released when he was discovered to be underage. He then finished high school and enrolled in university, but lacked the funds to graduate. Instead, he worked several odd jobs, including a stint in a metallurgical factory, before taking up journalism. Prus eventually made a name for himself as a writer of feuilletons, publishing his much-admired Kroniki in the Kurier Warszawski between 1875 and 1887, and also achieved some success with his short stories. The Outpost, published in 1885, was the first of four novels that secured his literary reputation. It was followed by The Doll (1890), Emancipated Women (1894), and The Pharaoh (1897). A respected but no longer fashionable writer, Prus dedicated his last years to social reform and philanthropic work.

Beware of Pity by Stefan Zweig (1939, translated by Phyllis Blewitt)

My Posts on Stefan Zweig

I thank Max u for the Amazon Gift Card that allowed me to read this book.  When I bought the Kindle edition a few days ago the price was $4.95, now it is $11.95.  

Beware of Pity is Stefan Zweig's only full length novel.  It is set in a small town in Austria, starting around 1908.  Zweig was a close friend of Sigmund Freud, he gave the funeral oration for him, and the novel is, among other things, a deep study of the nature,impact, causes and manifestations of the emotion of pity.  

We start in an officer's barrack.  Our male lead is a cavalery officer.  Being an officer is kind of a manly right of passage for an affluent young Austrian man.  The lead character has only a modest allowance from his aunt to supplement his pay.  He has to provide his own horse and he has a servant, a batman, to take care of his uniform and run errands.  Zweig did a great job of letting me see what it must have been like to be an officer in the Austrian army.  The garrison he is attached to is in a small town, but close enough to go to Vienna on leave.  The army is very old boy networking with senior officer seen as father figures and generals as near gods.  

One day his close friend takes him to a social event at the house of the richest man in the area.   As I read on in Beware of Pity at times I thought "yes, a real masterwork" but then sometimes I thought not quite but close.  A wild series of events is set in motion when the officer invites the wealthy man's seventeen year old daughter to dance.  Everyone is horrified when he does this.  The girl became a cripple a few years ago.  She launches into a nightmarish hysterical scene in which she tries to stand but collapses.  Stemming from the officer's attempt to set this right, an emotional roller coaster begins which just gets worse and worse.

There is a long monologue by the girl's doctor that is beyond brilliant in its analysis of medical treatments for "hopeless cases".  The girl's father is just a master work of paternal love.  The officer gets more and more trapped.  There are lots of interesting minor characters and fun to read about events.

I don't want to give away much of this marvelous plot.  The last few pages of the man's experiences in World War One and his reflections on what he saw are amazing, flawless.  We see how he was changed by the war.

Some will say maybe Zweig pulls on emotions too much and makes the girl a bit too much of a monster and I could only say I concede maybe this is correct but I found the story very suspecful.  I hope to see the movie one day.

Mel u

Balzac by Stefan Zweig. (1945, Translated by William and Dorothy Rose, 2012)

My Posts on Balzac

My Posts on Stefan Zweig

"“A strong light casts a deep shadow, and a childish weakness that would pass unnoticed in a normal person, or would be met with a sympathetic smile, cannot but appear grotesque in the case of a man whose knowledge of the world and its ways can only be compared with that of Shakespeare” - from Balzac by Stefan Zweig 

Stefan Zweig (1881 to 1942) intended his book on Balzac (1799 to 1850) to be his magnum opus, he worked on it for ten years, it was all but totally complete but for a few possible revisions for style  in 1940 when he moved to Brazil.  He left it behind.  His friend Richard Friedenthal (1896 to 1979) brought the work to posthumous publication in 1945. There is a very interesting a moving postscript from him in which he tells us the backstory on the book.

Balzac is a great book, I loved it.I savored the descriptions of the creative processes of Balzac and felt the anquish of his money problems.  Balzac was born of peasant stock but he wanted to be an aristocrat.  The term "de" in French, like "von" in German denotes a person as nobility.  Balzac added it to his name.  I really liked it when Zweig talked about French aristocrats would mock this pretention but when any Frenchman is asked to name the greatest of their novelists, they proudly say "Honore dé Balzac".   We learn a lot about his daily life,something biographies often neglect.  Have you ever read a long biography but never learned what the subject ate or what clothes he wore, how he spent his days? Zweig tells us how Balzac lived,when he slept, what he had for lunch and how he hid from creditors, who his friends were and details his love life.  

About  four months ago I decided to read, in translation, all of Balzac's Human Comedy.  I had before embarked on the project read most of the best know novels.  In all included are 41 novels, 25 short stories, and 25 novellas.  (Note the line between novel and novella is a blurry one but many book bloggers I follow could read the full work in three or so months. Practically it is a readable in one of the e book editions and probably it would be hard to do it otherwise.  I am reading in The Delphi Edition of The Works of Balzac.  The translations are older public domain works.  I am now just past the halfway point in The Human Comedy so I decided the time had come to read Balzac by Stefan Zweig. (I 

would say the more Balzac you have read, the more you will enjoy and benefit from Zweig's  book.)

Zweig tells the story in a straightforward chronological way.  He begins with the ancestory of Balzac so we can sense his deep existential ties to French earth.  Zweig tells us of Balzac's incredible ability to see into the hearts of things, his photographic memory for details, his great reading, his time in the streets of his city, Paris.  Then about age thirty, Balzac developed a work routine he would follow for most of his life.  He wrote at a simple table on special paper for ten to twelve hours a day, fueling him self on legend has it fifty cups of coffee a day.  He worked at night, a servant would bring him his meals.  He allowed himself no more than two hours a day for social pursuits.

Besides, of course, talking about in detail many of the wonderful works of Balzac and placing them in context in his life, Zweig pursues in depth and with great psychological acuity three very interrelated themes;  Balzac's perpetual money problems, his desire to live as and be thought of as a wealthy aristocrat, and his various romances, the famous ones with women of the nobility and others with largely unknown women.  Zweig stresses that Balzac was a man of gargantuan appetites and one has to assume he had his share of encounters with prostitutes, who might have taken care of his needs when his pursued aristocratic ladies deferred.  Balzac was a divided man, he worshipped the rich and held them in contempt as robbers.

 “The man who was producing the greatest creative work of the century and could have walked in the presence of kings and princes with the unconcern of a Beethoven suffered from an absurd mania for the aristocracy”. - from Balzac by Stefan Zweig 

I was surprised, though perhaps I should not have been, that a lot more than half of Balzac's readers were women.  He received many letters  from female readers  and, per Zweig, all his several lengthy romances with aristocratic women were first begun through correspondence.  Balzac wanted to find a wealthy wife to free him from constant stress and allow him to live as an aristocrat. Part of his romantic problem came from the fact that he would only spare at most two hours a day from his work to spend with his ladies.   Zweig also tells us of the several grand plans Balzac had for making money, among them growing pineapples in hot houses, being a big time theatrical producer and investing in a silver mind in Sardenia.  All just got him in more trouble.   Zweig says that some of Balzac's best work was done under stress.

Have you ever seen a police drama on TV where the policeman asks a robbery victim to describe the perpetrator and most people say things like, "a man, a white man".  I think Balzac would be able to give an exact very detailed full page description of the robber, down to the color of his shoes.  

Zweig uses his masterful narrative skills to turn the life if Balzac into a great work of art.  I will not tell, though many may know it, the tragic ending of the story.  I will say when Balzac did have a romance and then a marriage with a Russian Nobel woman, a widow, she and her daughter had little respect for his work and took him away from his writings.

Zweig talks a lot about the money side of Balzac's literary career. I am glad he did but I admit when Zweig said Balzac got say 15,000 Franc advance for a book I had no idea how to translate that into a 2015 equivalent.  I guess I could use Google to figure it out .  This is not Zweig's fault but maybe a footnote would have helped.  

I wonder what the literary output of Balzac would have been had he, as was Zweig, been born into great wealth?

Zweig tells us that he sees the best of Balzac as Cousin Bette and Cousin Pons.

Balzac is not documented for sources as a biography done now would be.  I felt the deep regard, respect and love Zweig had for Balzac.  I am so glad to have read this book.  There is just a great richness of fascinating details in this book.  Now I know how Balzac learned about military life, for example.

This book was published by Plunkett Lake Press

http://plunkettlakepress.com/

I strongly urge anyone into high quality E- Books to spend sometime looking at their very interesting offerings.

Mel u

Gosbeck by Honore de Balzac (1842, translated by Ellen Marriage, A Novella, A Component of the Human Comedy)

"I like to leave mud on a rich man's carpet. It is not out of petty spite.  I like to make them feel a touch of the claw of necessity".  - spoken by Gosbeck

My Posts on Balzac

It is true Balzac wrote a lot about the rich knowing it would sell better than stories about factory workers.  He spent huge amounts of money, often borrowed money, trying to pass himself as a rich aristocrat.  He even gave himself the honorarium "de" but Balzac could see through a thousand masks, including his own.

Gosbeck to me ranks among the best of Balzac, the last few pages were so powerful even in a 125 year old translation that I was stunned.  I almost don't believe I am saying this but the last few pages of Gosbeck made me think " is there anything in Dickens to match this".  Balzac is uneven, one work might be a great masterwork, the next far from it, but Gosbeck is the real thing!

Gosbeck is the story of a Parisian money lender.  Gosbeck does everything from loaning millions of Francs to Barons to advancing a Franc to a shop girl with a dress in hock.  The work is narrated as one man telling a story about another, a common 19th century device. We meet Gosbeck in a rooming house he shares with a young man.  Gosbeck lives with no ostentation at all, with just one old servant.  He gradually becomes friends with a young law student who also lives  in the roomig house and it is the student, grown to be a very successful attorney who will tell Gosbeck's story.  As the student gradually gets to know Gosbeck he senses his great shrewdness and his intimate knowledge of the flow of money in Paris, he realizes Gosbeck is truly rich.  In one scene that will make you ponder and perhaps be confused a bit (I was, it is OK) Gosbeck tells us that he and ten other financiers meet monthly to exchange information and take actions that behind the scenes control that much of the flow of money in Paris.  Each member of the consortium has his speciality, one  factories, one government finances, etc  Gosbeck focuses on the finances of the rich and the arts.  It is said Gosbeck is partially Jewish so I guess some will find conspiracy theories in this, I just thought Balzac was trying to write an exciting story.  The life story of Gosbeck before he settled down in Paris is just wonderfully relayed.  The day we go around with Gosbeck as he chases down debtors (and for sure Balzac knew about this) is just great.  

A rich aristocratic woman is having an affair with a rake, a reprobate reeking havoc among the nobility.  The woman comes to Gosbeck to pawn her diamonds to get the man out trouble.  I do not want to give away to much of the plot but the woman's husband comes to see Gosbeck and demands to know why his wife was visiting him.  He calls Gosbeck insulting names but backs down when Gosbeck challenges him to a duel.  Out of this eventually will come an amazing turn of events

As I said, the last four pages shocked me by their raw power.  

We also follow the life of the narrator, who I liked a lot and who is a very much a strongly done character.  He and Gosbeck remain life time friends and Gosbeck loans him the money to buy out the law practice of a successful attorney.  He laughed that Gosbeck still comes to him for free legal advice just like he was still a student.  

I think in the quotation below we can see a part of the depth of Balzac, the words are those of Gosbeck.

For sure this can be enjoyed as a stand alone work.  

46/91. Past the midpoint! 

I am now reading A Woman of Thirty.

Mel u

A Sentimental Education by Gustave Flaubert (1869, translated by Donald Parmée)

Some thoughts on my third reading of A Sentimental Education .  Dandys and all that!

"He traveled.

  Chilly adventures under canvas; dreary mail-packets; the dizzy kaleidoscope of landscapes and ruins; the bitter taste of friendships nipped in the bud:  such was the pattern of his life.

   He came home.

   He went into society..desire had lost its edge, the very springs of feeling had tried up.  his intellectual ambitions had also faded.  Years passed, and he came to terms with his mental stagnation and the numbness in his heart". From A Sentimental Education, part three, chapter six.

"The Dandy who begins with a taste for the heroic soon funds that there is no theater in which to exact heroism and he or she is driven back in the studio and drawing room, there to bemoan his frustration.  Perhaps the most finished example of the type in 19th century literature is Flaubert's Frederic Moureau, a figure which arises in the interregnum between a lost ancien regime and the replacement by a new code" - from Inventing Ireland -  Literature of the Modern Nation by Declan Kiberd.

As I read A Sentimental Education for the third time i had the thoughts of Declan Kiberd as a kind of guide.  As one reads on in the novel when the politcal turmoil in the country turns to violence in the streets in Paris, I thought could perceive a correspondence of the life history of Frederic Moureau to that of the country, both go through great turmoil to no real result.  The education of both teaches them to withdraw, to cultivate the self.

I am very interested in the figure of the dandy in literature.   I see him emerging in France in The Comedie Humaine to perhaps achieve apogee in Proust.  As mentioned by Susan Sontag in her "Notes on Camp", the dandy is related to camp somehow but dandys are not camp, dandys are not fops.  Camp and homosexuality are culturally linked and there are complex connections with this to the dandy.A dandy is a highly cultivated person, man or woman, often culturally refined to a level beyond the understanding of all but a few people.  The dandy plays a large role in Japanese literature, between the wars.  I have posted a lot on the role of the dandy in the short stories of Desmond Hogan.    Many dandys, as are the men in A Sentimental Education, are very much into prostitutes .  A knowledge of prostitutes and brothels  can be cultivated much like a knowledge of Opera or Chinese Cermamics.  Think for a bit on the person of James Bosewell.  

I laughed out loud at the hilarious duel scene and greatly relished the depiction of the fighting in the streets of Paris.  The food scenes were mouthwatering.  

From this point on, this is a rewritten mostly for style post from 2013.

Gustave Flaubert's (1821 to 1880) Madame Bovary is on everyone's list of best novels ever written, including mine.    To me Madame Bovary is an ice cold work of perfection in which one can only stand in awe.  I also think the only reason A Sentimental Education is not on all lists is that list makers fear two books by one author is somehow "unfair".

I first read Flaubert's  A Sentimental Education about four years ago.

Ford Madox Ford  purportedly said  one could not consider themself an educated person until you had read it fourteen times.   

  In very well done introduction to the Oxford Classics edition Parmee flirts with the idea of saying A Sentimental Education is better than War and Peace .  I really liked A Sentimental Education however I think one does not just like Madame Bovary any more than one would like the Taj Mahal or Guernica.

Here are some of the things I like about this book.   I like the character development of the central figure, Frederic Moreau.   The work is really full of great descriptions of life in Paris.  I enjoyed the accounts of political turmoil.  The food sounds great and there are some interesting romances along the way.  Some people, including Henry James, see this as a huge step down from Madame Bovary.  Aside from the fact that almost every novel is a huge step down from Madame Bovary I think one should first read it then this work.   The characters in A Sentimental Education are very self absorbed and the development of the education of Frederic is slow.   I liked the novel a lot as a whole but I loved the last chapter when we flash to Frederic as an older man, still pursuing a life of pleasure.   It was a lot of fun to hear of his visit in company of one of his close friends to a brothel and how it ruined their reputations when word got out.  Later the two men talk about how these times were the best of their lives.

Mel u
The Reading Life

Béatrix by Honore de Balzac (1839, A Novel - A Component of The Human Comedy)

My Posts on Balzac

 “The man who was producing the greatest creative work of the century and could have walked in the presence of kings and princes with the unconcern of a Beethoven suffered from an absurd mania for the aristocracy”. - from Balzac by Stefan Zweig 

Béatrix is perhaps of special intetest because Balzac drew upon the characters of real people for it.  George Sand, a very close friend and correspondent of Balzac, Marie d'Agoult, once a well known but now faded to obscurity writer, and the composer Franz Litz.

It is set among rural aristocrats and centers around a handsome young man and his various romances.  The best thing in Béatrix to me was the long characterizations of the George Sand character and the personage model on Marie d'Agoult.

I think this is mostly a novel  for Balzac completionists but Stefan Zweig felt if was among the best of the work of Balzac so maybe I need to reread it one day.

As I read on it Balzac I am also reading various online articles and have started Balzac by Stefan Zweig.  Zweig does a wonderful job of describing "a day in the life of Honore de Balzac".

45/91

I will,give the last word on Béatrix to Stefan Zweig

"The novel Béatrix, of which only the earlier chapters have any literary value, was provided with a sentimental ending lacking in any truth to life” 

Mel u